Web platform · design & development
MCOF
A church platform for planning, teams, events, giving and reporting — designed and built end to end.
- Role
- Design, Full-stack development
- Live
- mcof.vercel.app
01 / 14 01 — The challenge
What wasn't working
A growing church runs on volunteers, group chats and spreadsheets. Service planning lives in one document, team rosters in another, events in a chat thread, giving in a separate record — so the people organising it spend their week reconciling information instead of running ministries. And a newcomer looking for a first visit has nowhere obvious to start.
02 / 14 02 — The objective
What success had to look like
Give the church one platform for the work behind the scenes, and give visitors an obvious, welcoming first step — so the team's time goes into people rather than admin.
03 / 14 03 — The approach
How we decided to solve it
- Two audiences, one product
- The public side welcomes a newcomer and answers 'what is this place and when do I come?'. The internal side handles planning, teams, events and giving for the people running it.
- Design for volunteers
- The people using it are not full-time staff. Anything needing training or a manual would quietly go unused by the second month.
- Community as the front door
- Photography of the actual congregation does more to make a first visit feel safe than any amount of description.
- One record, many views
- Planning, teams and events share the same underlying information so nothing has to be entered twice or kept in sync by hand.
04 / 14 04 — The solution · 01
Making a first visit feel obvious
The public site opens with the community itself and one clear action — plan your visit — so a newcomer's first question is answered immediately.
05 / 14 04 — The solution · 02
Replacing the group chat
Planning, teams and events live in one place, so the week's organisation stops depending on who remembers which thread.
06 / 14 04 — The solution · 03
Making giving and reporting straightforward
Contributions and reporting sit inside the same system, so the numbers reconcile themselves.
07 / 14 05 — Key decision 01
Welcome before administration
The platform's public face is built for the person who has never walked in. Growth starts there, not in the back office.
08 / 14 05 — Key decision 02
Built for non-technical volunteers
Plain labels, short flows and forgiving interfaces — adoption is the whole game for church software.
09 / 14 05 — Key decision 03
Shared data across modules
Planning, teams and events reading from the same records removes the reconciliation work that made the old approach exhausting.
10 / 14 05 — Key decision 04
Real photography, not stock
A church is its people. Showing the actual congregation is both more honest and more persuasive than any illustration.
11 / 14 06 — The outcome
What changed
The church has one platform behind the scenes instead of scattered documents and chats, and a public front door that gives a newcomer an obvious first step. Built and running end to end, designed for volunteers rather than administrators.
12 / 14 08 — Capabilities
What we handled
- Product design
- UX
- UI design
- Full-stack development
- Payments
- Reporting
Built with Next.js · Application architecture · Responsive build
In one line
A community organised through chats and spreadsheets now runs on one platform — and the first thing a newcomer sees is an invitation rather than an information problem.
End of the story
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